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BELLAIRE, Ohio — The four miners who gathered one blustery morning at the United Mine Workers of
America hall know that, so far, they are lucky.

Their coal mines along the West Virginia border are still working, having survived a painful
30-year decline in the industry. But a new threat has pushed into Ohio, imperiling the primacy of
coal here and all over the country.

“I feel worried about the future, that natural gas is a threat to us,” said Tim Merryman, 54. “
Some of those coal plants will convert (to natural gas), and that’s a threat to coal guys.”

For more than 200 years, coal has been king in Ohio, occupying a privileged position in state
politics and as the fuel of choice for local power plants. Now, its supremacy is being challenged.
A natural-gas rush that has hurtled through the country over the past five years has pushed its way
into the coal fields of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. Entire villages in eastern Ohio are
leasing their land for gas drilling, and huge energy companies that relied on coal to generate
electricity are turning to natural gas.

Stoked by technological advances, the gas boom is transforming the United States and creating
winners and losers on a national level and in far-flung small towns. From Texas to North Dakota to
Pennsylvania, natural-gas production has brought jobs and revenue. It has also driven up rents in
small towns, torn up roads and led to lawsuits about control over energy development. And it has
raised environmental and public-health concerns.

The energy boom is also transforming the American economic landscape. The United States now
imports less crude oil than it has since 1987, thanks in large part to an oil rush in North Dakota
and a rise in vehicle fuel economy. More electricity now comes from renewable sources as the prices
of wind and solar fall and states put in place clean-energy mandates. Among the biggest shifts,
however, has been the rise of natural gas and with it, the increasingly fragile position of
coal.

As gas has risen, coal has dived. Long the primary fuel for the country’s power plants, coal has
been squeezed by cheap natural gas and tightening environmental regulations. With the arrival of
gas companies in Ohio, the coal industry and the towns and people tied to it find themselves
grappling with the complex risks and rewards unlocked by the national energy shift.

“Is the coal industry suffering? You bet,” said Thomas Stewart, executive vice president of the
Ohio Oil and Gas Association. “Not too long ago, coal was king and natural gas was the ugly
stepchild. You see companies switching the fuel they use. Coal is a very efficient fuel, but they’r
e the ugly stepchild now.”

Coal still is the most widely used fuel in power generation, but with each year, its share of
the domestic market has shrunk. Industry lobbies and their political allies assert that the
Environmental Protection Agency has declared “a war on coal” in the form of tighter pollution
rules. But independent analysts say cheap gas has played as crucial a role as regulation in eroding
coal’s supremacy.

In 1993, coal generated 53 percent of the nation’s electricity. By the end of 2012, it was just
37 percent. Natural gas, meanwhile, has risen from 13 percent of the fuel mix 20 years ago to 31
percent. Advances in horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing, a controversial
production method also known as fracking, have allowed companies to produce gas in geological
formations that were too technologically and financially daunting a generation ago.

Ohio has a long history of oil and gas production, but this latest wave of natural-gas
development is still in its early stages, unlike in Pennsylvania, where thousands of wells already
are producing. Only 249 wells have been drilled in Ohio, in great part because the pipeline network
has yet to catch up with the drilling interest. The gas here is so-called wet gas, more valuable
than the “dry gas” prevalent in Pennsylvania because it is extracted with certain liquids such as
ethane and butane that can also be sold on commodity markets.

The advance team for the gas boom has begun to course through eastern Ohio. Hotels are being
built along the interstates to house experienced oil and gas hands from Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas
and elsewhere. In St. Clairsville recently, the county deed recorder’s office was choked with about
45 mostly young men and a few women checking on who owns the mineral rights for parcels of land.
Two years ago, five visitors to the office would have made for a busy day.

Coal production in Ohio has held steady in recent years, but only because more of it is
exported. In Ohio, 82 percent of electricity still comes from coal, but the number is dropping. The
country’s second-largest power company and a huge coal consumer, AEP, based in Columbus, has been
burning more natural gas than in previous years because increased availability has driven down the
price.

Still, coal will continue to be a substantial part of the country’s fuel mix, says Mark
McCullough, AEP’s vice president of generation. As part of a recent legal settlement with the EPA
and other parties, AEP agreed to stop burning coal at power plants in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio by
2015.

But as gas elbows its way into coal country, disputes have started to emerge. Here in some parts
of Belmont County, drillers have to bore through shallower coal seams first to get to the gas
thousands of feet below ground. Coal companies can derail the drilling if they assert that it
impinges on a mine, even one that hasn’t been established yet. The Smith-Goshen Landowners Group
has leased 35,000 acres for gas drilling, and nearly all of it sits above seams belonging to Murray
Energy, the country’s largest privately owned coal company.

Gas and coal advocates use the arguments of environmentalists, whose assessments they normally
dismiss, to raise questions about the other side. Landowners leasing land to gas companies point to
the damage done by coal mining to Ohio.

A member of the Smith-Goshen group, dairy farmer Larry Cain, drives past the entrance to one of
Murray’s coal mines to give a visitor a view of an impoundment pond, a man-made lake of mining
sludge as far as the eye can see. The miners meeting in Bellaire, for their part, echo
environmentalists’ worries that hydraulic fracturing might contaminate water sources.

So far, many Ohioans, include some in coal mining, have had a hard time resisting the pocketbook
allure of gas. People are being offered $5,000 to $7,000 an acre to sign leases, and royalty
payments of 20 percent of revenues once gas is produced.

For years, Richard Clay worked as a coal miner in eastern Ohio. Now retired, Clay, 66, and his
wife, Kaye, 54, have leased their 140-acre cattle and sheep farm in Piedmont to Gulfport Energy.
Just signing the deal gave them enough money to pay off their mortgage. The company drilled a well
and set up storage tanks under a stand of trees where the Clays’ son got married. After seeing what
coal mining can do to the land, the Clays said, they were pleased by how little disruption the gas
drilling created.

“It felt wonderful to be able to pay off the mortgage,” Kaye Clay said. “At the same time, we
want this farm to be a heritage to our children, so we didn’t want it torn up.”

For many miners, the only solace during the gas rush may be that there is so much coal in the
country, it will have to be used somehow. To men such as those at the United Mine Workers hall in
Bellaire, natural gas may be needed, but it is a flash in the pan, the deposits here good for
perhaps 30 years, they contend. Coal, they say, can be used for maybe hundreds of years.

Says miner Rick Altman, “When they turn off the tap, the pocketbooks will dry up, too.”